How the Ballon d'Or Actually Works

The Ballon d'Or—French for "Golden Ball"—is an annual award given to the footballer judged to have performed best over the preceding season. It is presented by France Football, a French sports magazine, and since 2024 the gala has been co-organised with UEFA, though France Football retains control of the voting. Alongside the men's award there is the Ballon d'Or Feminin for women players, first awarded in 2018, plus a set of secondary trophies: the Kopa Trophy for the best player under 21 and the Yashin Trophy for the best goalkeeper, among others. The 70th edition is being presented tonight in London—the first time the ceremony has left France, a nod to Sir Stanley Matthews, the Englishman who won the very first award in 1956.

The award was created in 1956 by the France Football journalists Gabriel Hanot and Jacques Ferran, the same pair whose lobbying helped bring the European Cup into existence. For its first four decades it was a narrowly European prize: only players holding European nationality could win it. That restriction was loosened in 1995, when the award opened to players of any nationality playing for European clubs, and removed entirely in 2007, when every professional footballer in the world became eligible. Between 2010 and 2015 the award merged with the FIFA World Player of the Year to become the FIFA Ballon d'Or; the two bodies split again in 2016, with FIFA launching its own separate award.

There is no algorithm and no statistical model. A jury of specialist journalists—one representative per country, drawn from the top 100 nations in the FIFA world ranking—votes on a shortlist of nominees drawn up by France Football. Each voter ranks a set of players, and the rankings are converted into points; the highest total wins. Two things about this design matter. First, the electorate is journalists, not players or coaches, so the result reflects what a professional press corps found most impressive rather than any objective measure. Second, since 2022 the award has been judged on the football season rather than the calendar year—this edition covers 1 August 2025 to 31 July 2026—which aligns it with how club football is actually played.

Lionel Messi holds the record with eight wins, and is the only player to have won it while playing for three different clubs and while playing outside Europe. Cristiano Ronaldo has five, along with the most nominations of any player. Their near-duopoly from 2008 to 2017 was unprecedented in the award's history and remains the reference point for arguments about it. The recent winners are more varied: Karim Benzema in 2022, Messi again in 2023, the Manchester City midfielder Rodri in 2024, and Ousmane Dembele in 2025. On the women's side, Aitana Bonmati of Barcelona has won three in a row, from 2023 to 2025, following Alexia Putellas's back-to-back wins in 2021 and 2022. Neither award was given in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the season.

Football has no equivalent of a most-valuable-player award decided by a league office, so the Ballon d'Or fills that gap by default—it is a magazine's prize that the sport has collectively agreed to treat as canonical. That informality is the source of both its authority and its controversy. Because a jury of journalists is weighing trophies, individual brilliance, and narrative against each other with no fixed weighting, every result is arguable, and the arguments are a large part of why anyone cares. The award also shapes real outcomes: it drives transfer valuations, sponsorship deals, and how players are remembered decades later.